Saturday, October 4, 2014

No Body - The Uncanny Valley

Sean Lynch, under the moniker 800Beloved and, now, as No
Body, has always produced highly evocative music. Restless runs through endless
night, radiating with an uncannily comforting nostalgia that could just as
easily remind you of a nightmare, two electric limbs meeting in the ether,
bridging industrial to bubblegum-pop, new-wave to surfy sock-hop l-u-v ballads,
the guitars, sequenced beats and mellifluous moan/croons always slightly chilled
as though they were something hardened by that first frost-speckled breezes of
a late October air.

With No Body, the Michigan musician/songwriter and producer,
delves deeper into the realms of experimental synthesizer composition, while
also shying away from all the feedback, distortion and eco-pedals that invoked “shoegaze-revivalist”
remarks upon past 800Beloved records. The guitars are, inevitably, haunting;
but the spotlight is upon the synth and Lynch’s voice (the latter is much more
up front, free of any distortion whatsoever, marking another distinction from
800Beloved); meanwhile, the pulsating drum machines cast a spell while the
synths, like Martian Wizards, affect a menagerie of effects, tones and timbres,
whooshing gurgles closing in like cresting pipeline surf, frothed with spacey
shimmer.

On The Uncanny Valley,
Lynch seems to be crafting an ideal soundtrack to a surrealist noir pulp
romance film that’s yet to be directed, (and we’re not just saying that because
he shares namesakes with an actual famous director of similarly
darkly-fantastical fare). Uncanny Valley is
re-whittling more than a few genres as it bends, winds and whirls its way
through a mesmeric tunnel of percolated tones and rattling reverberations, essentially
incentivizing the otherwise alienating relentlessness of churning house music with
the feathery, reverb-splashed guitar strokes and then jerking a few healthy tears
loose from the otherwise bloodshot/cold-stare mechanical eye of krautrock by
injecting a few warming major keys and some subtly buoyant melodies onto the
factory floor.